About Me

Michael Glover is a Sheffield-born, London-based poet, art critic and editor of The Bow-Wow Shop (www.bowwowshop.org.uk), an international poetry forum. He was born in Sheffield, Yorkshire, and read English at Queens' College, Cambridge. His collections of poetry include: Impossible Horizons (Sinclair-Stevenson, 1995), Amidst all this Debris (Dagger Press, 2002) For the Sheer Hell of Living (San Marco Press, 2008) and Only So Much (Savage Poets Collective, 2011). Headlong into Pennilessness, a memoir of growing up in Sheffield, was published By ACM Retro in 2011.

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Thursday, 6 August 2015

Last
autumn, John Constable's small painting of the trunk of a great elm
tree – so bulky and so vividly corpulent that it was almost
huggable - shouldered its way into the space above such words as
these. Here is another tree, this time captured on a sullen Yorkshire
afternoon in springtime, on a day when the lapwings had just returned
to their old nesting grounds in a nearby field. This tree is Chinese
in origin, and it sits amongst English yews, in front of an
eighteenth-century chapel, in a sculpture park.

Unlike
Constable's, this tree is neither more nor less than a symbol. In
common with so many of the works of Ai Wei-Wei, it proceeds by
stealth. It does not sloganeer. It does not bang drums. His art is
not so much an art of protest as an art of life-affirmation.

In
part, it has the look of a tree. And in other respects it does not,
not quite. It is, for example, a vivid orange tree – and by that I
do not mean that it will in time be glad-handing the fortunate few
with a crop of oranges. No, I mean that it is a rusting tree, in hue
and actuality, and that it will continue to rust and to rust – it
had the silvery sheen of new metal in 2013, when it was first put on
public display inside that nearby chapel - until it becomes too
dangerous for its own good. At which point it will suffer some
equivalent of felling.

Yes,
here we have a tree amongst old trees which is in fact a simulacrum
of a tree. It consists of 97 separate parts, and each segment is cast
in iron from a Chinese tree part. Its inspiration comes from street
vendors of wood in Jingdhezen, Southern China. The whole is awkward,
ungainly, fistily comical and wonderfully tenacious. In order to be
itself at all, each limb or part-bole has had to be bolted and
screwed together to every other part, as if it were a work of human
manufacture. Which it is. The elements do not quite fit – one
section of its massive trunk seems to be sliding sideways, drunkenly.
The limbs gesture skyward, wildly, helplessly. Rivulets of rusting
iron look as if they might just taste tangy. Its characterfulness
also comprehends something rather nasty and even fairy-tale-cronish
too.

We
try to decide whether these are cast parts from one tree or many. We
fail to reach a final conclusion. It is undoubtedly a tree of sorts,
but this tree is also a message, we cannot but feel, about the
condition of man in the world, this awkward, bolted-together creature
who is forever striving to cohere as something credible and singular,
forever striving to hold his own amongst more authentic versions of
himself. Ai Wei Wei is by no means the first person of great
imaginative reach to extrapolate from tree parts to the nature of the
human condition. Read Jonathan Swift's great Meditations Upon a
Broomstick, for example. At least this tree is the right way up.

Biography

Ai
Weiwei was born in Beijing in 1957. In 1958, he and his family were
exiled to Xinjiang, Northwest China, his poet-father having been
accused of 'rightism'. He lived in New York from 1981 to 1993. On his
return to China, he co-founded Beijing East Village, an experimental
artists' cooperative. His passport was confiscated in 2014.

He
utterly dominates Room 62 of the Sainsbury Wing of the National
Gallery, this steely-eyed man, just as he would once have
dominated the intricately vicious politics of Venice at the turn of
the sixteenth century. I am speaking of Doge Leonardo Loredan, as
depicted by Giovanni Bellini, in a painting said to have been
executed in about 1501, the year that the Doge took office – an
office he was to hold, unbroken, for the next twenty years of almost
ceaseless warfare between the Republic and her many enemies. To call
this portrait arrestingly magnificent is to sell it short. It is one
of the greatest and most startling portraits of the Western canon,
painted by a man, the greatest painter of an entire family of
remarkable painters, who was at the heart of the political and
cultural life of Venice for the duration of his long life –
Giovanni Bellini finally died in 1616, aged 86.

I
have a crude rule for testing the worth of any work of art. It is
called the Ten-Second Test. If any work of art is worth staring at
for as long as ten seconds, it stands a chance. That’s it. Most
works of art – and especially those which are being made today
under the name of ‘art’ – fail that test miserably. Three
seconds, perhaps four, are quite enough. To apply such a test to this
portrait of the Doge would be laughable in the extreme. The more you
stare at it, the more you become absorbed into the marvellously
unsettling richness of its ambiguities. There is the test, you see:
this work is inexhaustible. The more you look at it, the more it
seems to say to you. In this respect, it resembles a great poem.

Surprisingly for a
secular portrait, the Doge is not in profile, but face-on (well, in
fact, just slightly askance) to the painter and the onlooker – this
face-on mode of depiction, for most of the Middle Ages, was generally
reserved for sacred portraiture. Now a Doge, a mere mortal man, has
been given the treatment once reserved for sacred subjects. And yet
this man was not a king, and even less an absolute monarch - and we
sense and feel this from the way in which Bellini has painted him.
Monarchs more often than not look like over-stuffed balloons. They
have little characterful reality, little genuine solidity. They are
little more than the majestic way in which they are being
represented. Think of Van Dyke’s ridiculous portrait of Charles I
on horseback, for example, recently on display at Tate Britain,
galloping towards us like a bewigged crazy on a pantomime horse, or
of Goya’s glittering dismissals of the Spanish Royal Family whose
court painter he was paid to be. More fools them! These paintings,
for all their visual splendour, are often nothing but gloriously
laughable pieces of puffery. They are lies.

The Doge, on the other
hand, is at least two things at once. He is a human being
spectacularly adorned in the vestments of his office – gorgeously
brocaded mantle worked over, in gold thread, with pineapple motifs
which we can see upside down; a ducal cap – known as a ‘corno’
(an allusion to its single horn) - worn over a linen skull cap - but
he is also the brutally focussed man that he needed to be in order to
negotiate his way through the diplomatic challenges of being Doge of
the Republic of Venice. This face is lean, wary, ascetic - almost to
the point of revealing a slight tendency towards emaciation. A
spiritual man then – but a spiritual man with an iron fist. It is
the face of a master tactician, a diplomat. This is not a fat-faced
Henry.

We are also a little
surprised by the fact that the portrait is relatively modest in size
– portraits of men of importance are usually as large as possible.
This reminds us of the fact that the Doge was a man amongst men,
elected by a committee of 41 aristocrats, perpetually subject to
checks and balances; and a man, moreover, who earned relatively
little from his official duties; who was not allowed to show favours
to members of his own family; and whose rights to own properties
outside the Republic was severely restricted. And yet his ceremonial
functions were extraordinary – and this is why he is tricked out in
such splendour, in robes of such brilliance.

But he ends mid-chest,
and he stands behind a marble balustrade, looking out towards the
Grand Canal or the Piazza San Marco (or, since the middle of the
nineteenth century, towards rivals for his attention at London’s
National Gallery), coolly appraising, almost rigid. Why is he cut off
like this? Why is he not full-length? (By all accounts, he was not a
short man so, unlike, say, Alan Ladd, he did not need to pretend.)
Again, it is all to do with politics. The head-and-torso format of
this portrait reminds us – and, I am sure, quite deliberately so -
of Roman portrait busts. One great empire leads naturally on to
another. It is also an attested fact that the Doge’s family
believed itself to be the direct descendants of a Roman hero called
Caius Mucius Scaevola.

I too am an hero, he is
telling us, a servant of god, a master amongst men, within strictly
defined limits, of course, which I not-so-humbly acknowledge.

Giovanni
Bellini (1530-1616) was one of the greatest of the Venetian painters
of the Renaissance, whose subject matter encompassed sacred themes,
secular portraiture and historical narrative. He pioneered the use of
oil painting, and became celebrated for his tonal range and the
richness of his colour.